Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

Outside of the continual wish to have an aristocratic life free of the specious ambition to either sustain himself as a working class slave or by the stretch of his imagination a CEO slave, a doctor, or a senator, Jatupon’s inward feelings were beginning to subtly change away from his love of his brother, Kazem. His ideas and feelings were shifting toward impermanence with each letter he received from Noppawan Piggy. Finally, he had a friend although for the past few years Jatupon had virtually had none. As much as new manhood awakened old instincts deep in cellular memory for the odor, the touch, the pleasure and the pounding of any type of sexual activity where the differing force of the thrusts and the stirred waves of his hormones all whizzed him in a unique frenzy for a brief time, he yearned more for Noppawan. He yearned for her ideas and her presence.

He considered his need for her one time as the two brothers lay naked immediately after a sexual encounter under a ceiling fan that was newly installed. He watched the blades chopping through the musty air and in a very minute sotto voce of his thoughts he yearned for destruction. He wanted for the wobbly fan to fall and guillotine his head. For the most part, however, sexual acts like this one were his rocket fuel to Nirvana. It always brought him into a religious state that he couldn’t duplicate in any other way. That one moment after his brother’s sexual act and his own masturbation, he was free of wanting anything. At such times he just lay there breathing in the oxygen deeply and feeling fully satisfied with being. This too he yearned for and only his brother was able to grant him Nirvana.

At last he had a friend. This relationship gave him more meaning to the days than even the rain. Sustained reflexes as an assistant cook had caused the days to stumble along on deformed feet so uneventfully after his parents’ death. Now it wasn’t so bad. After the washed-plate monotony of late evenings he would often pull out of his back pocket a letter that he had read many times before. At both restaurants Kazem and Suthep individually razzed him about his new girlfriend but they believed that he did not know anyone. To them the girl had to be some remote villager wanting to learn about life in Bangkok by advertising for a pen pal in the back of the comic book pages. On one night of one particularly troublesome week without a letter he went to sleep from his banal world at an empty table and dreamed his anything but banal dreams. Within Jatupon’s sleep there were at first tire swings and butterflies nestling on succulent flowers but then on the flowers there was the perfidious couplings of mosquitoes. He smelt the pheromones that the male had emitted to make the female believe that it was following a whole army of male hunters who had procured food when really there was just that one male poised relaxingly waiting for the ovulating specimen to come to its perch. The female was as white as Kumpee’s Chinese girlfriend and she hated and loved the guile as much as the deceiver in that unique mix that makes sex such a delight. Then, after finishing its frenzy, the mosquito was back with him.

“I don’t understand this delay in meeting” he dreamed of himself telling the mosquito.

“Still, after nearly four months in this city, you think that the senator is really trying to fit you into his schedule of dinner guests and your sweet mother and father are going to return from the dust.”

“Something like that. I don’t want to be forgotten. If Mother and Father are really dead in the true sense of the word I won’t be able to see them again.”

“Dear me, when are you going to shake your boyish Thai ways? Being respectful to a couple morons who accidentally conceived you in their sexual frenzy is too preposterous. Regarding death, I can’t see anything wrong in just plain death. You kill enough of us when you do your laundry each week. I see you emptying out puddle-remnants of the previous week’s water from your plastic buckets where we are laying our eggs and then pouring in new laundry soap and water. You attempt to flatten us with the palms of your hands. You never seem to consider death such a tragedy in those circumstances. I can’t see why any being—mosquito or human—would want to continue on for thousands of years anyway. A being continually growing from the same old bud in an environment not all that conducive to growth becomes as fallow as the world around him. So much negativity from all of those disillusioned experiences withers one in ennui-I can’t think of anything more horrid! Then comes petty greediness to have something; and no one is pettier than old men whom you give the “wei.” Thais extend this deference to these beastly wrinkled beings as if age makes such grumbling, maundering creatures continually thinking of their mortality and their aches and pains enlightened beings. I can’t see that it would be good to live forever. It is better to die off completely and let the energy come back as something totally different. This new being will dance its dance and celebrate the novelty of the world before adulthood hits him across the face with a mallet.”

When they got home it was sleep again so that they would wake up with energy and motivation to do more work. Before Jatupon awakened naturally to the sun-god (the night having deadened his soul and put him to sleep as any ancient Egyptian laborer long ago believed of his own life), so Kazem in darkness came to his startled awakenings with an alarm clock as well as the alarm of and in his own brain that yearned for sustenance and more which always came from money. With no love oil, and no rimming, he took Jatupon with maximum thrusts engendering within him the inclination, if not the incitement, for violence. Jatupon’s first thoughts of the morning were that he wanted to slit his brother’s throat. He wanted to cut off Kazem’s head, stuff it, and put it on a bookshelf had they purchased a bookshelf. It was no wonder, he thought, that this one had no girlfriends. Who would care to have one so large-so large! As the lovemaking subsided, it tossed Kazem back into a nap like the soothing backward movement of the tide. Jatupon felt that he was bleeding and so he went to the toilet and sat on the stool feeling beneath him from time to time to see if there was blood. There wasn’t any. He sat and sat virtually thoughtless until the idea returned that he could kill him. He wanted to kill him veritably. He could take one of the new television sets that Kazem had purchased for he and Suthep and smash his head while he was sleeping. He could spray paint the walls with air freshener and light a match. The whole room could be set ablaze like a funeral pyre. He got up and dressed. He needed to escape. He needed to run away to the street people before his actions matched his thoughts. He needed to be with the street people. He told himself that he loved them veritably. He scavenged money from Kazem’s pants and took a taxi to an abandoned railway station with its severed tracks where weeds or moss grew a little on most of everything and homeless, crippled dogs with one or more smashed paws found a respite. He purchased some amphetamines from one of the street people and, done in sync with his glue, his head began to spin. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which he was exposed to from a movie on the television earlier that week, played in his head and the dogs with their mangled paws began dancing. Plaid or corrugated he thought two things intermittingly as the dogs continued to dance: * Kazem, when he thought of Kumpee, wanted to twist off his head like a crawdad-he who had stolen their money and put them in this hole. Then his anger subsided by again recalling a good thing that had come out of it. He, as yet, did not have to pay for rent or utilities. Also the two of the siblings were gone allowing him to be liberated. The idea of being a teenager free of mother and father had been intriguing to him. As much as he mourned the deaths of his parents, their deaths had seemed to him liberation to manhood and his own sexual fulfillment. The same was true of Kazem and Suthep. He didn’t resist Kumpee’s plan to replant them in the modern sordid capital of Bangkok. He sensed all along that Kumpee would leave them and he didn’t murmur a word. His opposition to Suthep’s departure was mostly a show. He wanted to pursue that liberation with impunity. He went to work . * “I can’t stand the boredom of everything around me” “But you have to survive,” said the mosquito. “All animals have to survive.” “I am declaring a day off. Besides, when I see you I can’t do anything else.” “Aren’t you the lucky one?” said the mosquito. * Kazem liked how obscure his petty actions were in the city. No matter what one did here it was obscure. Here no one pretended to care-so absorbed they were in making sure that their own sordid activities were kept inside that they didn’t need to feign being shocked or to gossip about human anomalies all which were as old as the species. * “Why aren’t you sitting. You are just leaning against the building, staring across severed train tracks.” “I’m in pain. I can’t sit.” * Long before light or orange robed monks made their alms he hauled his cart from a lot where he stored it for a fee. Hauling it on the edge of the street like any other hapless ones, occasionally he met gaunt dogs, salesman of real stores helping the deliverymen get their produce off the trucks and dragging the boxes to the sidewalks, ice-cream salesman on tiny bicycle-driven stores, and the glass aquarium fruit cars with their gravel of ice that other hapless ones pushed along the street; and from it all it was hard to feel alone. Sound and motion beat off the cruel static morbidity of his own thinking that had the compunction of criticizing him for his actions with the youngest brother and saw no future outside of monthly drunken vigils with fellow restaurant workers and those rare occasions when he went off with Suthem to ladies of the night he paid for.-is he thinking about me, thought Jatupon. -as he sets up the restaurant, is he thinking about me? * “And taking that makes you feel less blue?” “At least less alone.” “Maybe you are an addict.” “I don’t think so. It is recreational.” “Sounds like a venereal disease. It sounds American.” * He liked being unmonitored. Sure, there was adrenalin gained from the hunt of a woman but more came from the more forbidden pleasures. A man with money was more alluring to a female who needed this more vehemently than sperm for the making of offspring. What did he have to give a woman. He had dated before. He was big. It fascinated but repelled them. * “I told you. I was feeling blue; and I like how the world turns around like a carousel of caricatures when I mix the glue and the pills. Tracks, dogs, and the old abandoned railway station seem to be breathing. I don’t have anyone else. Sometimes I like hearing from you.” “How kind!” said the mosquito stoically. * Suthep’s apathy had come from the acceptance of something deeply sordid in himself. Policemen were paid their paltry sums and had bigger crimes to corner than family perverts. His was a business so meager that it retained a tax exempt status by the nature of no status at all, a business existing with no address although this oversight was compensated for by a policeman who came to extort money from Kazem weekly. Being sordid was a type of wisdom. From it he was cognizant that such instincts to conquer sexually were part of the sadistic imaginings of the creative force or the pragmatic cause and effect that engendered the floundering of human existence and he was hardly the god for redesigning it all-especially he who rarely thought of it as being essentially wrong in theory despite feeling nominally guilty. * “Do you think that he loves me?” “What definition of love are we using now?” “The real one. I’m older now-almost 15. I know. Do you think he loves me like someone with a great sickness inside of him who desperately seeks medication or a yearning to slam himself into me fully like one entity?” “Okay, I’ll grant you that one,” said the mosquito and then it guffawed. * And so, unchaining the tables from beneath his cart, pulling out the plastic stools underneath, and kicking away a few sleeping dogs that were lying there to be tripped over like disheveled rugs, alone he started his business. He chatted with those he encountered and felt the light commotion of an awakening world fill him with its harmony before routine tasks dominated over him. * His father had tried to squash him. He was excoriated for standing, sitting, combing his hair, where he parted his hair, the food he ate, the meat he abhorred, and the clothes he put on. He couldn’t do anything. He wasn’t anything. * Stirring a pot of rice deep memories ran by him in glimpsed ghostly passing stirring up raw negative feelings that created the hard product of his thoughts. His father had been an aggressor at all times who never mellowed any to his death. For many early years Kazem’s ears had been pulled daily. He had been dragged by the hair. He had been forced to sit daily on a little red footstool next to his father as punishment for not only youthful exuberance (youth which ran around on two feet whereas he had to flounder with a cane) but for the intractable insolence that would interfere with his punishment of the two “suck-calves” of the youngest brothers whom he hated. Kazem still had the scars of cigarette burns in his brown skin as palpable and tangible proof that the man had really existed.-No, more than that. His love for me is more than just a sickness although it has that in it, said Jatupon to the mosquito.

He couldn’t tell where he was. Faces of his parents, Kumpee, the aunt and uncle, the monks at the temple school, and that boy he had been friends with for so many years (the one who had been with him begging in front of the Dunkin Doughnuts shop and, a couple years ago, had allowed his feet to slip from an open window that time they had made their petty attempt into major thievery on that runaway trip into Bangkok) all were without faces but wandering around like ghosts in his thoughts. He could see the forms of these people in his head but only a few of them had the slightest trace of a face. He had somehow defaced them. Time had defaced them. Memory was fading. As the hours passed uncomfortably he became more aware of himself. He forced himself to be more rational. He was hungry and tired. He wanted to go home. He told himself that he’d kill his brother the next time he did something like that. And yet, when he was about ready to be put in jail that time in Bangkok it had been Kazem who had stolen money from their parents. It was Kazem who had paid off a police officer.

Nawin reflected Porn’s feelings. “So, you don’t feel purposeful. You are in a relationship with a man who spends his time with his paints leaving you alone in the cold of Canada without feeling purposeful. You got so sick of washing dishes that we’ve now gone to paper plates.” He chuckled. She smiled. “ I care about you. I’m glad you are here with me. Regarding purpose, we’ll work on that. I’ll see if I can get you a job on campus. I’ll definitely stop things from now on anytime you want to talk. If you want to go out to a movie, I’ll go out with you.”